MODULARITY IN IMPLICIT MEMORY OF SHAPE

本研究旨在探讨人类对视觉形状的内隐记忆过程。通过两项心理学实验，研究了人类内隐记忆对视觉形状的内部表征是应将其划分为亮度、颜色、运动等视觉属性的视觉模块，还是应将其整合为表征图案形状的共同形式。在人类言语内隐记忆实验中使用的启动范式，在人类视觉内隐记忆实验中被采用。在人类参与者记住了几个视觉形状之后，他们对其他视觉形状的记忆痕迹通过启动任务来测量。为了澄清视觉模块的效果，引入了一种实验条件，在这种实验条件下，定义记忆形状的亮度、颜色和运动等属性与检查性能变化时定义形状的属性不同。在定义记忆形状的属性与考试中定义形状的属性相同的控制条件下，对实验条件下的表现进行了比较。对于被试不熟悉的随机矩阵作为记忆材料，如果改变定义属性，启动效应会减弱（实验1）。然而，对于日语字母的平假名字符，即使定义属性发生改变，也会观察到启动效应（实验2）。这两个实验结果的差异表明，熟悉程度对内隐记忆和视觉模块之间的关系有影响。

This research was aimed to investigate the processes of human implicit memory for visual shapes. Two psychological experiments were conducted to examine whether the internal representation of human implicit memory for visual shapes should be separated into vision modules for visual attributes such as luminance, color, motion and so forth, or integrated into the common form that represented the shapes of the patterns. Priming paradigm, which had been used in experiments for human verbal implicit memory, was used in the present experiments of the human visual implicit memory. After human participants memorized several visual shapes, their memory traces for other visual shapes were measured by priming tasks. To clarify the effects of the vision modules, introduced was an experimental condition was in which the attributes such as luminance, color, and motion that defined the memorized shapes were not same as the attributes that defined the shapes in the examination of the performance changes. The performance in the experimental condition was compared that in the control condition in which the attributes that defined the memorized shapes were same as the attributes hat defined the shapes in the examination. For random matrices which were not familiar to the participants used as memorized materials, priming effects were diminished if the defining attributes were changed (experiment 1). For hira-gana characters of Japanese alphabets, however, priming effects were observed even if the defining attributes were changed (experiment 2). The difference between the results of those two experiments suggested an influence of the familiarity of on the relationship between the implicit memory and the vision modules.